IMPLICATION FOR FLETCHERIAN LOVE TO ASSISTED REPRODUCTION AND SURVIVAL OF HUMANITY

Abstract

This paper examines Joseph Fletcher's concept of love and its implications for assisted reproduction (AR) and the survival of humanity. Fletcher, in his seminal work, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966), suggests that love is pivotal to the morality of human action. Thus, actions inspired by love are morally praiseworthy and ought to be recommended. This work tries to analytically decipher the import of love in Fletcher and how such love-inspired ethics could be applied to resolve conicts concerning the morality of AR. A case is made for a situational approach to ethical reasoning when human continuity is threatened by the problem of infertility. And this, based on situational exigencies, makes the need for AR a viable ethical alternative when natural means of procreation proves unfruitful. Proponents of the need for robust control of population explosion seem to be carried away by the narrative of overpopulation and consider talks about infertility as irrelevant viewing from the macro level. However, a more humane understanding of the prevalence of infertility is possible when viewed from the micro level taking cognizance of familial and cultural considerations. Despite some rebuttals of AR as demeaning parenthood and procreation, the paper argues that the evolution of society and the need for sustaining humanity make AR an act of benecence and legitimate means of making babies. Thus when human continuation is imperiled, procreative intervention to preserve the human species ought to be seen as both therapeutic and ethical.